Increasingly enterprises and governments are turning to technology to automate and streamline their internal operations and business processes. Furthermore, the advent of the Internet and the World-Wide Web (WWW) has allowed enterprises and governments to deliver goods and services in an automated and nearly instantaneous fashion across the entire globe.
With any good or service provided by an enterprise or a government, there can be potentially a myriad of activities and expenses associated with those activities, which the enterprise or government endures before the good or service is available in the marketplace for consumption.
For example, word processing software has to be initially defined, developed and tested before it can be released for sale. These activities are usually managed internally by high-salaried project managers. For the most part, the project managers are administrators with skill in acquiring other personnel and equipment within an enterprise to make a project move from conception and development to release. In some cases, projects are so large within an enterprise that multiple layers of project managers are needed for any given project.
In large part, the industry has not been able to successfully automate and streamline the project management process. As a result, the cost of goods and services are likely unduly inflated and the time-to-market for goods and services is longer than it probably should be.
One reason for this lack of automation is the perceived complexity associated with project management in general. There are a variety of considerations such as laws, regulations, internal procedures that have to be followed. In addition, there may be limited personnel with specific skill sets some of which may be in high demand and unavailable within the enterprise and some of which the enterprise does not have and will have to contract out or hire in order to obtain.
Moreover, even when a manually implemented project management system is in place within an enterprise, the technique used to transition a project between stages is a push method. In other words, when a project is ready to move to a next stage of its lifecycle it is pushed from its current stage to the next stage. But there may be many circumstances in which a push technique is not desirable.
For example, with today's mobile computing environment a next stage of a project may be associated with a laptop that is offline when the desired push from a current stage is attempted. In another scenario, the next stage's processing environment may not be configured and ready for operation when the push is attempted. In yet another case, the user pushing from the current stage may have not access rights to push to the next stage.
As a result, even with automated and manual approaches the traditional push approach is deficient in many situations.
Thus, what is needed is an automated and flexible mechanism, which allows for improved project transitioning between stages of its lifecycle that extend beyond the conventional push approach.